Chad

By: Ari Nave

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Chad

Chad’s contemporary poverty and ethnic discord have deep historical roots. Beginning in the late first millennium, powerful kingdoms and empires arose in the central Sahel region. Their power derived in part from their control over the trans-Saharan trade carried by the Toubou and Arab pastoralists of the northern desert. The peoples of both the desert and Sahel regions adopted Islam during the Middle Ages. Until the late nineteenth century, the Sahel kingdoms conducted slave raids against the peoples of the south, who lacked states and complex social hierarchies and who maintained traditional religious practices.

French colonialism reversed the traditional dominance of the Islamic northern and central regions. The French concentrated development in southern Chad because of its greater agricultural capacity, while they disrupted the trans-Saharan trade that had made the northern and central regions powerful and wealthy. As a consequence, southerners, and especially the Sara people, rose through the colonial civil service and dominated Chad’s government after independence. Their indifference or hostility toward the peoples of the central and northern regions sparked resentment and, eventually, more than two decades of intermittent civil war. During the 1990s relative peace slowly returned to Chad, as democratic elections took place and the country’s war-torn economy gradually recovered. Nevertheless, the country remains one of the poorest in the world, and low-level ethnic conflicts continue, particularly in the south.

Geography and Early History

Chad’s three distinct ecological zones have supported different ethnic groups pursuing a range of different livelihoods. The northern portion is a desert whose inhabitants have traditionally practiced either pastoral nomadism or oasis agriculture. The seasonal grasslands of the middle region, the Sahel, have historically supported livestock herding. The southern section, known as the Sudanese zone, receives a higher rainfall that sustains a savanna environment of grasses, shrubs, and scattered trees. Large-scale agriculture has been possible only in this southern region.

Chad

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People have inhabited the region of contemporary Chad for thousands of years. Although the Sahara occupies much of northern Chad today, this region once enjoyed a less arid environment. African Rock Art discovered at Ennedi plateau, today one of the driest regions of northern Chad, provides the earliest clues about the region’s inhabitants. In Ennedi 9,000 years ago, artists left remarkable depictions of local big-game hunting and harpoon fishing. Until perhaps 7,000 years ago a much larger Lake Chad, known as Mega-Chad, covered 336,700 sq km (130,000 sq mi) and stood 55 m (180 ft) above its current level. Over time, however, the region became drier, large numbers of people congregated around the receding shores of Mega-Chad, and by the second millennium B.C.E. local people were farming cereal crops such as millet. Oral histories suggest that an ancient lakeside people, the Sao, the ancestors of present-day Kotoko-speakers along the Chari and Logone rivers, once dominated much of the region around the lake. Archaeological finds reveal that by the tenth century C.E.. the Sao lived in walled cities and engaged in complex artistic practices, including iron and bronze casting using the lost-wax technique. Under the Kanem-Bornu empire, however, the Kanembu apparently displaced and absorbed the Sao, who disappeared as a distinct ethnic group by the seventeenth century.

Empires of the Sahel

By about the fifth century B.C.E. the development of iron-smelting technology accompanied an increase in agricultural production in the southern savanna zone. By the fifth century C.E.., desert peoples first acquired the camel from either North Africa or the Nile Valley. These animals facilitated trans-Saharan trade routes. Commodities such as salt, horses, firearms, and glass beads traveled south, while traders carried ivory and especially slaves north. The appropriation of surplus agricultural goods and the control over this trade gave rise to stratified societies, including the three historic kingdoms of Kanem-Bornu, Wadai, and Bagirmi.

In the ninth century C.E.. the Zaghawa, pastoralists of the Ennedi Massif, established a centralized state around Kanem on the northeast shores of Lake Chad. The Kanem empire grew to encompass other groups, including the Toubue (Tubu), of the Tibesti Massif. From the mid-eleventh until the nineteenth century, the Sefuwa, a Kanembu lineage claiming descent from the Zaghawa, ruled the Kanem empire. Trans-Saharan traders brought Islam to Kanem, where it became widespread by the eleventh century.

During the fourteenth century, internal divisions in Kanem allowed Bulala Arabs to oust the Sefuwa from power. The Sefuwa fled to the region of Bornu in present-day Nigeria, where they regrouped and rapidly established a new powerful kingdom. (After intermarrying with the Sao of Bornu, the Kanembu became known as the Kanuri). The Sefuwa recaptured Kanem in the 1500s. The Sefuwa rulers, however, remained in Bornu and allowed the Bulula to continue ruling Kanem as tributaries. At its peak in the 1400s, Kanem-Bornu extended west to the borders of Songhai, in the Niger Basin, and north into the Fezzan, in present-day Libya. In the following century, however, Tuareg raids caused an increasingly famine-weakened Kanem-Bornu to lose control over the vital trans-Saharan trade routes through Fezzan. Excessive tax collection and internal strife made the empire vulnerable to attacks by the Fulani of the Sokoto Caliphate, which conquered Kanem-Bornu’s western provinces. Kanem-Bornu finally fell in 1893 to the army of the infamous Sudanese slave raider, Rabih al-Zubayr.

Far to the east of Kanem-Bornu, near the present-day border with Sudan, the non-Muslim Tunjur people founded the Wadai (or Ouadai) kingdom in the sixteenth century. In either 1611 or 1635, Maba people, led by Abd-el-Kerim, mounted a popular revolt and installed an Islamic dynasty. Initially, Wadai was forced to pay tribute to the more powerful neighboring kingdoms of Bornu and Darfur (in present-day Sudan). But by the eighteenth century Wadai had gained enough strength to assert its sovereignty and carry out raids on Kanem-Bornu. Wadai’s wealth derived from its trade in slaves and the tribute it demanded from surrounding chiefdoms. The Wadai sultans organized slave raids over a vast area to the south, including parts of the present-day Central African Republic. Many of these slaves were marched from Wadai through Darfur to the Nile River. The kingdom experienced frequent turbulent transitions between rulers, particularly during the nineteenth century. In 1835 Darfur took advantage of the instability to conquer Wadai, but in the 1890s the kingdom fell under the control of a proxy of Rabih.

Bagirmi, centered on the city of Massénya just southeast of Bornu, likewise arose during the sixteenth century. For much of their history, however, the kingdom’s Barma leadership remained subject to more powerful neighboring kingdoms. Bagirmi also engaged in slave raiding, and specialized in supplying eunuchs to the Ottoman Empire. Despite the adoption of Islam by its rulers, Wadai repeatedly invaded Bagirmi during the seventeenth century on the pretext of reinstating Muslim rule. In fact, the rulers of Bagirmi had refused to pay tribute to Bornu, and Bornu asked Wadai to invade on their behalf. Wadai captured thousands of Barma and other peoples and sold them into slavery. In 1892 Rabih captured Massénya. When the rulers of Bagirmi solicited protection from France, Rabih had Massénya burnt to the ground.

At the end of the nineteenth century Rabih embarked upon a campaign to create a personally ruled empire spanning Central Africa. During the 1880s and 1890s he defeated Wadai and conquered Bagirmi, Adamawa (in present-day Cameroon), Bornu, and much of the present-day Central African Republic. He set up a capital at Dikwa, south of Lake Chad. The British gave some consideration to recognizing Rabih’s sovereignty, but in 1900 they chose instead to partition his territory with France.

European Conquest and Colonization

The French faced fierce resistance from Rabih. After several small skirmishes, Rabih’s army faced a large French force in 1900 at the Battle of Kousseri. Rabih was killed and his forces were defeated; the French slowly consolidated their control over the region. In 1910 Chad became a part of French Equatorial Africa. A decade later France instituted a civilian administration for southern Chad. Because of Chad’s isolation and political, economic, and strategic unimportance, however, nearly half of all civil service positions were empty at any given time. Indeed, French officials were often assigned to Chad as a punishment.

For several years, the French failed to subdue the Muslim theocracy, the Sanusiya, who had ruled northern Chad and parts of Libya since the late nineteenth century. By 1919, however, the last of the sporadic fighting ceased, and the French exercised hegemony over the region. The northern areas of Chad remained fairly independent of French influence, as long as their inhabitants complied with the slavery ban and did not interfere with French forces. This sparsely populated region, which the French designated the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti (BET) Prefecture, remained under the direct jurisdiction, if not the control, of the governor general in Brazzaville until 1946. In reality, the Sanusiya order continued to have great influence in the north. Thus, Chad was the last territory in Africa that France fully colonized.

The French depended heavily upon soldiers from Chad to combat uprisings in its equatorial holdings. Village chiefs were required to fill quotas for conscripts. France also relied on forced labor to support its colonial effort. When people fled their villages to avoid forced labor or porterage, local collaborators would commonly kidnap women and children or confiscate movable property to coerce the men to work. Alternatively, French forces burned houses and crops to enforce demands for labor. Since the Muslim-dominated north resisted forced labor, the French concentrated their efforts on the south. Tens of thousands of Chadians labored on the construction of a railroad from Pointe-Noire to Brazzaville, in the present-day Republic of the Congo, between 1921 and 1936. Sources estimate that perhaps half of the workers died as a direct result of inhumane working conditions.

French colonialism dramatically altered the economy of Chad. The French undermined the centuries-old trans-Saharan trade by regulating and taxing caravan routes, and by building motorable roads that diverted trade to the Atlantic coast. The disruption of the trans-Saharan trade served to impoverish the people of northern Chad.

France also instituted a head tax throughout its colonies after 1901. The French justified the tax as a means to make the colonies “self-sufficient.” In fact, the tax served to pay for the salaries of French officials and for the construction of transportation infrastructure primarily benefiting French entrepreneurs. Probably more importantly, the tax forced the peasantry to participate in the cash economy, either by growing cash crops or by working for a wage in French-owned enterprises. Farmers in the fertile south were forced to cultivate cotton to pay their tax. Colonial administrators required them to sell their crop to the French monopoly, Cotonfran, which paid below market value for their crops. Those unfortunates who could not pay often faced severe corporal punishment or imprisonment. The forced adoption of cotton made Chad vulnerable to famine and dependent upon global market prices for the cash crop that continues to dominate its economy. It also undermined traditional society by replacing communal institutions with individual market relations.

French colonialism exacerbated regional disparities. French authorities virtually ignored the arid Muslim north, including the areas of the former Sahel kingdoms that once dominated the region. Meanwhile, inhabitants of the south enjoyed the few advantages of colonial occupation. The most important of these was access to a western education and to low- and mid-level positions in the colonial bureaucracy. By the end of the colonial era, southerners, reversing the historical pattern, dominated the country’s economy and politics.

Following World War II, Chad, along with other African colonies, gained limited autonomy as an overseas territory with representation in the French national assembly. The inhabitants were granted citizenship and political parties were legalized. A large number of political parties representing a broad range of interests had formed by the late 1950s. Conservative forces, such as Union Démocratique Tchadienne (UDT), representing French commercial interests and traditional Muslim leaders, advocated the continuation of strong ties with France and respect for traditional authority. In contrast, progressive parties, including the Parti Progressiste Tchadien (PPT) organized by civil servants and labor activists, sought complete independence as well as social and economic reforms. The PPT received its greatest support from the Sara, an ethnic group that dominated the more modern and developed south, while Muslim merchants from the Sahel supported the UDT. After the introduction of universal suffrage in 1956 the PPT gained the lion’s share of popular support.

Independence

In a 1958 referendum, Chad’s voters chose to form a republic within the French community. PPT leader François Tombalbaye won election as prime minister in 1959. Chad declared independence in August 1960 with Tombalbaye as president. In 1962 the autocratic Tombalbaye banned all political parties except the PPT, and Chad became an increasingly corrupt one-party state dominated by the Sara. After demonstrations in the capital, N’Djamena, in 1963, Tombalbaye declared a state of emergency and dissolved the National Assembly. When French troops evacuated the BET in 1965, Sara administrators took over and proceeded to alienate the local population with their inefficiency and their often insensitive and sometimes humiliating demands. Discontent and alienation festered, particularly in the Muslim north, until civil disobedience broke out in 1965. The resistance movement coalesced in 1966 into the Front de la libération nationale du Tchad (FROLINAT), operating from a base in Libya. Tombalbaye relied on French assistance to contain the insurgence, which, however, persisted. In the south Tombalbaye also lost support after instituting unpopular economic programs, banning Christian names in an authenticité program modeled after Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo), and making harsh Sara initiation rituals mandatory for non-Muslim Chadians. Meanwhile, during the early 1970s, an increasingly severe drought ravaged Chad. The drought damaged the country’s economically vital cotton crop and caused special hardship in the arid, livestock-dependent north.

In 1975, soldiers from the south assassinated Tombalbaye in a coup d’état. A military council, headed by General Félix Malloum, took control of the government. Malloum called for reconciliation with FROLINAT. While one segment of FROLINAT, led by Hissène Habré, joined the Malloum government in 1978, the main body of the rebel force led by Oueddei Goukouni continued to combat government forces. When conflicts between Malloum and Habré deteriorated into armed conflict in 1979, Habré’s forces occupied much of N’Djamena and forced Malloum into exile. Meanwhile, FROLINAT forces led by Goukouni also entered the capital and established a fragile accommodation with Habré. A brutal wave of ethnic killings swept both the north and the south. Remnants of the national army retreated to the south, where southerners established a separate provisional government. With the country in complete disarray, Nigeria, fearful of a compromised border, pressured the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to broker a peace agreement between the warring factions.

The result was the establishment in 1979 of a Gouvernement d’union nationale de transition (GUNT). The GUNT coalition quickly broke down, however, and violence once again shook N’Djamena. Habré fled to the eastern town of Biltine and later to Sudan. Goukouni seized control and immediately looked to Libya for support. In 1980 Libya’s head of state, Muammar al-Qaddafi, deployed 15,000 troops into Chad. In 1981 the two leaders called for a political unification of Chad with Libya. France reacted with alarm and maneuvered to force a Libyan withdrawal. Meanwhile, both the United States and France reportedly provided covert backing to Habré.

Habré’s Forces armées du nord (FAN) seized N’Djamena, and Habré formed a new government in 1982. Goukouni, who had fled the country, soon returned to the north and regained control of the BET, again with Libyan support. Libya aimed to enforce its claim to the “Aozou strip,” a swath of territory in northern Chad. France sent troops in 1983 to prevent Goukouni and the Libyans from moving south of an “interdiction line” between northern and central Chad, and the fighting briefly ceased. Unresolved political and ethnic resentments, however, sparked rebellion in the south. The fighting drove some 25,000 refugees to flee to the Central African Republic. By 1986 the fighting between the troops of Habré, supported by U.S. arms and French troops, and Goukouni, supported by Libyan forces, once again resumed. Habré reclaimed most of the north from Goukouni and the Libyans in 1987. In 1988 Chad and Libya resumed diplomatic relations and agreed to submit their territorial dispute to international mediation. In 1994 Libya accepted the judgment of the International Court of Justice, which rejected Libya’s claims to the disputed territory.

Meanwhile, in 1989 a government minister and two senior military officers, including Idriss Déby, led an unsuccessful coup attempt. Déby fled to Sudan. Habré responded by trying to consolidate his power. A 1989 popular referendum approved a new constitution that established a single-party state and awarded Habré another seven-year term as president. In 1990, however, Déby returned from Sudan with 2,000 troops, and Habré fled to Senegal.

Despite promises to institute democratic reforms, Déby initially followed the familiar pattern of ethnic nepotism, patronage, and autocratic rule. Nevertheless, in 1991 Déby declared his commitment to eventual democratic rule and permitted the registration of opposition political parties. During the early 1990s Déby’s government faced civilian protests against austerity measures, including tax increases, layoffs, and salary reductions for civil servants and members of the military. At the same time, the government deflected a number of attempted coups and armed rebellions, particularly in the south. International human rights organizations criticized the regime for its response to the unrest. A transitional government drafted a constitution in 1994 for a multiparty democracy, and Déby declared an amnesty for political prisoners. A popular referendum approved the draft constitution in 1996, and Déby won the presidency in a multiparty election. After several postponements, Déby’s party dominated legislative elections in 1997. Though Déby’s defeated opponents claimed electoral fraud, international observers declared the elections free and fair.

In 1998 a rebellion in northern Chad threatened the country’s attempts to return to normalcy. A peace agreement was signed in January 2002, calling for the rebels to be reintegrated into Chad’s political system, though this and subsequent efforts failed to fully extinguish the violence. Sporadic fighting continued throughout much of the decade, some of it spurred on by Déby’s success in removing constitutional barriers to another term as president.

Three decades of continual warfare have left Chad one of the poorest countries in the world. Though the economy has shown recent signs of improvement, a poor transport infrastructure, and continued reliance on cotton and other crops vulnerable to drought has limited the country’s potential for prosperity. Ethnic and religious divisions continue to run deep. The government continues to face armed resistance from rebels in the south demanding regional autonomy, and in 1998 Amnesty International charged the government with arbitrarily killing civilians from the south.

See also Human Rights in Africa; Islam in Africa; Ivory trade; Salt Trade.

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